Ahmed (2016), Shahab, What is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton University Press 2016 'What Is Islam? formulates a new conceptual language for analyzing Islam. It presents a new paradigm of how Muslims have historically understood divine revelation--one that enables us to understand how and why Muslims through history have embraced values such as exploration, ambiguity, aestheticization, polyvalence, and relativism, as well as practices such as figural art, music, and even wine drinking as Islamic. It also puts forward a new understanding of the historical constitution of Islamic law and its relationship to philosophical ethics and political theory.' 
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Al-Khalili (2010), Jim, Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science, Allen Lane 2010 ' For over 700 years the international language of science was Arabic. In Pathfinders, Jim al-Khalili celebrates the forgotten pioneers who helped shape our understanding of the world. All scientists have stood on the shoulders of giants. But most historical accounts today suggest that the achievements of the ancient Greeks were not matched until the European Renaissance in the 16th century, a 1,000-year period dismissed as the Dark Ages. In the ninth-century, however, the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Abu Ja'far Abdullah al-Ma'mun, created the greatest centre of learning the world had ever seen, known as Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom. The scientists and philosophers he brought together sparked a period of extraordinary discovery, in every field imaginable, launching a golden age of Arabic science. Few of these scientists, however, are now known in the western world. Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, a polymath who outshines everyone in history except Leonardo da Vinci? The Syrian astronomer Ibn al-Shatir, whose manuscripts would inspire Copernicus's heliocentric model of the solar system? Or the 13th-century Andalucian physician Ibn al-Nafees, who correctly described blood circulation 400 years before William Harvey? Iraqi Ibn al-Haytham who practised the modern scientific method 700 years before Bacon and Descartes, and founded the field of modern optics before Newton? Or even ninth-century zoologist al-Jahith, who developed a theory of natural selection a thousand years before Darwin? The West needs to see the Islamic world through new eyes and the Islamic world, in turn, to take pride in its extraordinarily rich heritage. Anyone who reads this book will understand why.' 
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Alter (2004), Robert, The Five Books of Moses, W. W.Norton 2004 ' Through a distinguished career of critical scholarship and translation, Robert Alter has equipped ua to read thr Hebrew Bible as a powerful cohesive work of literature. In this landmark work, Alter's masterly translation and probing commentary combine to give contemporary readers the definitive edition of the Five Books of Moses. 
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Nielsen (2016), Michael A., and Isaac L Chuang, Quantum Computation and Quantum Information, Cambridge University Press 2016 Review: A rigorous, comprehensive text on quantum information is timely. The study of quantum information and computation represents a particularly direct route to understanding quantum mechanics. Unlike the traditional route to quantum mechanics via Schroedinger's equation and the hydrogen atom, the study of quantum information requires no calculus, merely a knowledge of complex numbers and matrix multiplication. In addition, quantum information processing gives direct access to the traditionally advanced topics of measurement of quantum systems and decoherence.' Seth Lloyd, Department of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT, Nature 6876: vol 416 page 19, 7 March 2002. 
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Pais (1986), Abraham, Inward Bound: Of Matter and Forces in the Physical World, Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press 1986 Preface: 'I will attempt to describe what has been discovered and understood about the constituents of matter, the laws to which they are subject and the forces that act on them [in the period 1895-1983]. . . . I will attempt to convey that these have been times of progress and stagnation, of order and chaos, of belief and incredulity, of the conventional and the bizarre; also of revolutionaries and conservatives, of science by individuals and by consortia, of little gadgets and big machines, and of modest funds and big moneys.' AP 
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Streater (2000), Raymond F, and Arthur S Wightman, PCT, Spin, Statistics and All That, Princeton University Press 2000 Amazon product description: 'PCT, Spin and Statistics, and All That is the classic summary of and introduction to the achievements of Axiomatic Quantum Field Theory. This theory gives precise mathematical responses to questions like: What is a quantized field? What are the physically indispensable attributes of a quantized field? Furthermore, Axiomatic Field Theory shows that a number of physically important predictions of quantum field theory are mathematical consequences of the axioms. Here Raymond Streater and Arthur Wightman treat only results that can be rigorously proved, and these are presented in an elegant style that makes them available to a broad range of physics and theoretical mathematics.' 
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Zee (2010), Anthony, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell, Princeton University Press 2010 ' Since it was first published, Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell has quickly established itself as the most accessible and comprehensive introduction to this profound and deeply fascinating area of theoretical physics. Now in this fully revised and expanded edition, A. Zee covers the latest advances while providing a solid conceptual foundation for students to build on, making this the most up-to-date and modern textbook on quantum field theory available. This expanded edition features several additional chapters, as well as an entirely new section describing recent developments in quantum field theory such as gravitational waves, the helicity spinor formalism, on-shell gluon scattering, recursion relations for amplitudes with complex momenta, and the hidden connection between Yang-Mills theory and Einstein gravity. Zee also provides added exercises, explanations, and examples, as well as detailed appendices, solutions to selected exercises, and suggestions for further reading.' 
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Albert Einstein (1916a), Emission and Absorption of Radiation in Quantum Theory, ' Sixteen years ago, when Planck created quantum theory by deriving his radiation formula, he took the following approach. He calculated the mean energy Ē of a resonator as a function of temperature according to his newly found quantum-theoretic basic principles, and determined from this the radiation density ρ as a function of frequency ν and temperature. He accomplished this by deriving — based upon electromagnetic considerations — a relation between radiation density and resonator energy Ē:

Ē = c³ ρ / 8 π ν^{2 (1)}

His derivation was of unparalleled boldness, but found brilliant confirmation. Not only the radiation formula proper and the calculated value of the elementary quantum in it was confirmed, but also the quantum-theoretically calculated value of Ē was confirmed by later investigations on specific heat. In this manner, equation (1), originally found by electromagnetic reasoning, was also confirmed. However, it remained unsatisfactory that the electromagnetic-mechanical analysis, which led to (1), is incompatible with quantum theory, and it is not surprising that Planck himself and all theoreticians who work on this topic incessantly tried to modify the theory such as to base it on noncontradictory foundations. ' back

Albert Einstein (1916b), On the Quantum Theory of Radiation , ' The formal similarity between the chromatic distribution curve for thermal radiation and the Maxwell velocity-distribution law is too striking to have remained hidden for long. In fact, it was this similarity which led W. Wien, some time ago, to an extension of the radiation formula in his important theoretical paper, in which he derived his displacement law [. . .]
As is well known, [Wien] discovered the formula [. . .]
which is still accepted as correct in the limit of large values of v/T (Wien's radiation formula). Today we know that no approach which is founded on classical mechanics and electrodynamics can yield a useful radiation formula.
Next, Planck in his fundamental investigation based his radiation formula on the assumption of discrete portions of energy, from which quantum theory developed rapidly [. . .].
Not long ago I discovered a derivation of Planck's formula which was closely related to Wien's original argument and which was based on the fundamental assumption of quantum theory. This derivation displays the relationship between Maxwell's curve and the chromatic distribution curve and deserves attention not only because of its simplicity, but especially because it seems to throw some light on the mechanism of emission and absorption of radiation by matter, a process which is still obscure to us.' back

Alex Lo (2026_04_04), The twilight of US hegemony and Israeli expansionism, ' It’s time the Europeans learned that Washington cannot be relied on, if it doesn’t actually work against them. Even the usually dogmatic European Union foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas reportedly clashed with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio over the US’ failure to keep its commitment to Ukraine. European leaders need a complete rethink on the US.
Warmongers in Israel and the US claim Iran could be firing missiles at Berlin or London in a few years if it isn’t defanged now. The same people had been warning for decades that Iran was years or just months away from a nuclear weapon, never mind there was actually a fatwa against acquiring such weapons issued by the man they assassinated at the beginning of the war.
But there wouldn’t be any missile firing in the first place if the US and Israel weren’t keeping the Middle East in an almost permanent state of siege.
Thankfully, the world is moving towards a multipolar system, and the Iran war is just speeding up the process.' back

Bardeen, Cooper & Hawking (1973_07), The four laws of black hole mechanics, 'Expressions are derived for the mass of a stationary axisymmetric solution of the Einstein equations containing a black hole surrounded by matter and for the difference in mass between two neighboring such solutions. Two of the quantities which appear in these expressions, namely the area A of the event horizon and the “surface gravity” κ of the black hole, have a close analogy with entropy and temperature respectively. This analogy suggests the formulation of four laws of black hole mechanics which correspond to and in some ways transcend the four laws of thermodynamics. back

Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, Brouwer fixed point theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'Among hundreds of fixed-point theorems] Brouwer's is particularly well known, due in part to its use across numerous fields of mathematics. In its original field, this result is one of the key theorems characterizing the topology of Euclidean spaces, along with the Jordan curve theorem, the hairy ball theorem, the invariance of dimension and the Borsuk–Ulam theorem. This gives it a place among the fundamental theorems of topology.' back

Byzantine Empire - Wikipedia, Byzantine Empire - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Byzantine Empire, also known as the Eastern Roman Empire, was the continuation of the Roman Empire centred on Constantinople during late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Having survived the events that caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, it endured until the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire in 1453. The term 'Byzantine Empire' was coined only after its demise; its citizens used the term 'Roman Empire' and called themselves 'Romans'.
During the early centuries of the Roman Empire, the western provinces were Latinised, but the eastern parts kept their Hellenistic culture. Constantine I (r. 324–337) legalised Christianity and moved the capital to Constantinople. Theodosius I (r. 379–395) made Christianity the state religion and Greek gradually replaced Latin for official use. The empire adopted a defensive strategy and, throughout its remaining history, experienced recurring cycles of decline and recovery.' back

CMC Invest, CMC Market Invest, ' Regulated and licensed by the ASIC (Australian Financial Services No:246381) Version 4.7.9589.26689 PSVAU4WBRW003
It is important for you to consider the relevant Terms and Conditions and any other relevant legal documents before you decide whether or not to acquire any of the financial products issued by CMC Markets. Refer to our Website for Terms and Conditions, Privacy Statement, Risk Notice, Dispute Handling process and other important legal documents. CMC from time-to-time acts on behalf of bidders in relation to off-market or on-market takeovers or on-market buy-backs. Click here for a listing of active transactions.' back

Druski’s viral whiteface skit isn’t racism. It’s satire that punches up at power, Druski’s viral whiteface skit isn’t racism. It’s satire that punches up at power, ' American comedian Druski has gone viral with a short parody video titled “How Conservative Women in America Act”.
In it, Druski plays a character whose costumes, make-up and activities all resemble those of right-wing activist Erika Kirk, widow of former Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk – whose role she has taken up.
Conservatives are up in arms, predictably. Many are calling it racism or reverse racism. Imagine, they declare, how fast a white man would be cancelled if he were to don blackface to send up the activities of an African American widow.c But this backlash misses the point. Blackface and whiteface are not opposite and equal. Blackface punches down. Whiteface can’t .Whiteface draws attention to the privileges and protections that whiteness allows.
It uses exaggeration – in this case the ordering of not just coffee, but a “sweet cream foam chai ice matcha” with an “organic pup cup” for the fluffy pet – to draw attention to how gaudy and obviously performative the elite white class can be.
The joke in whiteface comedy is not “this person is white”, but “this person is protected, entitled and used to being in control”.
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Glada Pizzoni (2025_11_27), How Catholic women in 18th‑century Italy defied sexual harassment in the confessional, ' The European Institute for Gender Equality defines sexual harassment as follows: “any form of unwanted verbal, non-verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature occurs, with the purpose or effect of violating the dignity of a person, in particular when creating an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment”. Harassment stems from power, and it is meant to control either psychologically or sexually. In both instances, victims often feel confused, alone, and uncertain about whether they caused the abuse.
As a historian, I aim to understand how women in the past experienced and tackled intimidating behaviour. Particularly, I am looking at harassment during confession in 18th-century Italy. Catholic women approached this sacrament to share doubts and hopes about subjects ranging from reproduction to menstruation, but at times were met with patronising remarks that unsettled them.
The Vatican archives show us that some of the men who made these remarks dismissed them as emerging from sheer camaraderie or from curiosity, or as boastfulness, and that they belittled women who remained upset or resentful. The women were often younger, they had less power, and they could be threatened to comply. Yet, the archives also show us how some women deemed these exchanges inappropriate and stood up to such abuse.
The archives hold the records of the trials of the Inquisition tribunals, which all over the Italian peninsula handled reports of harassment and abuse in the confessional booth. For women, confession was paramount because it dictated morality. A priest’s duty was to ask women if they were abiding Christians, and a woman’s morals were bound to her sexuality. Church canons taught that sex was to be only heterosexual, genital, and within marriage. Sexuality was framed by a moral code of sin and shame, but women were active sexual agents, learning from experience and observation. The inner workings of the female body were a mystery, but sex was not. While literate men had access to medical treatises, women learned through knowledge exchanged within the family and with peers. However, beyond their neighbourhoods, some women saw the confessional box as a safe space where they could vent, question their experiences, and seek advice on the topic of sexuality. Clergymen acted as spiritual guides, semi-divine figures that could provide solace – a power imbalance that could lead to harassment and abuse. [. . .]
Women were also often and repeatedly asked about pleasure: if they touched themselves when alone; if they touched other females, or boys, or even animals; if they looked at their friends’ "shameful parts” to compare who “had the largest or the tightest natura, with hair or not” (ADDF, CAUSE 1732 f.516). To women, these comments were inappropriate intrusions; to male harassers, they could be examples of titillating curiosity and advice, such as when a Franciscan friar, in 1715, dismissed intrusive comments about a woman’s sexual life (ADDF, Stanza Storica, M7 R, Trial 3). ' back

Ibn Khaldun - Wikipedia, Ibn Khaldun - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' bn Khaldun[a] (27 May 1332 – 17 March 1406, 732–808 AH) was an Arab[ scholar, historian, philosopher, and sociologist. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the greatest social scientists of the Middle Ages, and is considered by a number of scholars to be a major forerunner of historiography, sociology, economics, and demography studies.>br> His best-known book is the Muqaddimah or Prolegomena ("Introduction"), which he wrote in six months as he states in his autobiography. It later influenced 17th-century and 19th-century Ottoman historians such as Kâtip Çelebi, Mustafa Naima and Ahmed Cevdet Pasha, who used its theories to analyze the growth and decline of the Ottoman Empire. Ibn Khaldun interacted with Tamerlane, the founder of the Timurid Empire. He has been called one of the most prominent Muslim and Arab scholars and historians.[Recently, Ibn Khaldun's works have been compared with those of influential European philosophers such as Niccolò Machiavelli, Giambattista Vico, David Hume, G. W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, and Auguste Comte as well as the economists David Ricardo and Adam Smith, suggesting that their ideas found precedent (although not direct influence) in his. He has also been influential on certain modern Islamic thinkers (e.g. those of the traditionalist school). ' back

Islamic Golden Age - Wikipedia, Islamic Golden Age - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, The Islamic Golden Age was a period of scientific, economic, and cultural flourishing in the history of Islam, traditionally dated from the 8th century to the 13th century.
This period is traditionally understood to have begun during the reign of the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid (786–809), with the establishment of the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, one of the world’s largest cities at the time. The institution attracted scholars from across the Muslim world to translate the classical knowledge of the known world into Arabic and Persian. The intellectual and cultural activity also flourished in other urban centers of the medieval Islamic world, including Al-Andalus—especially Umayyad Córdoba, as well as Seville and, in later centuries, Nasrid Granada—along with Fatimid Cairo and other major cities linked through shared intellectual and commercial networks. The period is traditionally said to have ended with the collapse of the Abbasid caliphate following the Mongol invasions and the siege of Baghdad in 1258.' back

James Bogle (2017), Whiteley, ' Whiteley is a 2017 Australian documentary directed by James Bogle and produced by Sue Clothier. It explores the life of painter Brett Whiteley, from his birth in Sydney to his death alone in a motel room. It uses collage, montage and re-enactments, using personal photo albums, archival material, press clippings, letters and footage from Don Featherstone's Difficult Pleasure documentary on Whiteley.' back

Jeffrey Nicholls (1987), A theory of Peace, ' The argument: I began to think about peace in a very practical way during the Viet Nam war. I was the right age to be called up. I was exempted because I was a clergyman, but despite the terrors that war held for me, I think I might have gone. It was my first whiff of the force of patriotism. To my amazement, it was strong enough to make even me face death.
In the Church, I became embroiled in a deeper war. Not a war between goodies and baddies, but the war between good and evil that lies at the heart of all human consciousness. Existence is a struggle. We need all the help we can get. Religion is part of that help and theology is the scientific foundation of religion.' back

Jim Al-Khalili (2009), Science and Islam, BBC 4: 'Physicist Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the great leap in scientific knowledge that took place in the Islamic world between the 8th and 14th centuries. Al-Khalili turns detective, hunting for clues that show how the scientific revolution that took place in the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe had its roots in the earlier world of medieval Islam. He travels across Iran, Syria and Egypt to discover the huge astronomical advances made by Islamic scholars through their obsession with accurate measurement and coherent and rigorous mathematics. He then visits Italy to see how those Islamic ideas permeated into the west and ultimately helped shape the works of the great European astronomer Copernicus, and investigates why science in the Islamic world appeared to go into decline after the 16th and 17th centuries, only for it to re-emerge in the present day. Al-Khalili ends his journey in the Royan Institute in the Iranian capital Tehran, looking at how science is now regarded in the Islamic world.' back

Klein-Nishina formula - Wikipedia, Klein-Nishina formula - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 'The Klein–Nishina formula gives the differential cross section of photons scattered from a single free electron in lowest order of quantum electrodynamics. At low frequencies (e.g., visible light) this is referred to as Thomson scattering; at higher frequencies (e.g., x-rays and gamma-rays) this is referred to as Compton scattering.' back

Luis Parrales (2026_03_31), The Real Religious ‘Renewal’ Happening in Gen Z, ' Each Sunday, a group of Catholics meets in the basement of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village after the 6 p.m. Mass. They mingle over wine and cheese for half an hour, and then Father Jonah Teller, a Dominican friar and priest, usually leads an hour-long discussion—about the nature of freedom, perhaps, or the virtue of hope, or a theologically laden Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. The weekly gathering is called In Vino Veritas, Latin for “In wine, there is truth.”
Nearly everyone there is young—from the ages of 21 to 35, according to Father Teller—a contrast with the population of American Catholicism as a whole. (According to the Pew Research Center, nearly three in five U.S. Catholic adults are 50 or older.) And weekly attendance is growing. After the coronavirus pandemic, Father Teller told me, it hovered in the single digits; by 2025, it averaged a bit more than 100 attendees. So far this year, approximately 150 people, most of them young professionals in finance, tech, and the arts, spend a given Sunday evening in the Greenwich Village basement. [. . .]
St. Joseph’s in Greenwich Village seems to have a similar draw. As Father Teller sees it, events such as In Vino Veritas foster a place where young professionals can find “identity and community together,” especially through philosophical and theological conversation. That identity, he insists, is decidedly nonpolitical. (“There’s a wide variety of political ideologies and opinions that are represented at St. Joseph’s,” he said.) It’s also, at times, ecumenical. A recent In Vino Veritas gathering, for example, featured a roundtable with Protestant pastors discussing interdenominational dialogue; a “smattering” of non-Catholic Christians visit. “It’s just a very healthy third space for people to encounter ideas and other people,” Father Teller said. back

Malcolm Longair (2025_04_13), '…a paper …I hold to be great guns’: a commentary on Maxwell (1865) ‘A dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field’, ' Maxwell's great paper of 1865 established his dynamical theory of the electromagnetic field. The origins of the paper lay in his earlier papers of 1856, in which he began the mathematical elaboration of Faraday's researches into electromagnetism, and of 1861–1862, in which the displacement current was introduced. These earlier works were based upon mechanical analogies. In the paper of 1865, the focus shifts to the role of the fields themselves as a description of electromagnetic phenomena. The somewhat artificial mechanical models by which he had arrived at his field equations a few years earlier were stripped away. Maxwell's introduction of the concept of fields to explain physical phenomena provided the essential link between the mechanical world of Newtonian physics and the theory of fields, as elaborated by Einstein and others, which lies at the heart of twentieth and twenty-first century physics. This commentary was written to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.' back

Nicola Welsh-Burke (2026_03_31), , ' In mid-March, an activist group in Rutland County, Vermont, held its usual weekly rally protesting the actions of US president Donald Trump. One protester, Marsha Cassel, led the crowd, dressed as a naked Trump wearing a crown and holding a staff. Cassel was followed by another protester holding a sign proclaiming “THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES!”. This is not the first time Trump has been compared to Hans Christian Andersen’s bumbling emperor, who marched naked through the streets while claiming to be dressed in finery – a fiction many of his subjects willingly indulged.
Who was Andersen, what aspects of his life informed this particular story and why might this be useful to know in the age of Trump?
Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, in 1805. While his grandfather supposedly claimed noble origins for the family, Andersen’s father was a cobbler and his mother an illiterate washerwoman.
After his father died, Andersen moved to Copenhagen for work, where he found a patron, theatre director Jonas Collin, who paid for his education. Andersen started writing after graduating from university, becoming well known for his fairy tales, which he began publishing in the 1830s.
The Emperor’s New Clothes is in his 1837 work, Fairy Tales Told for Children, which featured other memorable tales such as The Steadfast Tin Soldier and The Little Mermaid.
The story follows a vain and clothes-obsessed emperor who commissions clothing from two travelling conmen. These men, posing as weavers, visit his court to show off a new kind of material, which is supposedly rendered invisible to a man “unfit for the office he held”, or “extraordinarily simple in character”.' back

Nicola Wlsh-Burke (2026_03_31), The Emperor’s New Clothes – a fairy tale for our times? , ' The Emperor’s New Clothes is in his 1837 work, Fairy Tales Told for Children, which featured other memorable tales such as The Steadfast Tin Soldier and The Little Mermaid.
The story follows a vain and clothes-obsessed emperor who commissions clothing from two travelling conmen. These men, posing as weavers, visit his court to show off a new kind of material, which is supposedly rendered invisible to a man “unfit for the office he held”, or “extraordinarily simple in character”.
Afraid to reveal that he cannot see the material, the emperor sends in several aides to review the process, who all lie about being able to see the clothes being made.
Once the “outfit” is finished, the emperor dons it and parades naked through the town. The townsfolk compliment the garments, until a small child bursts the bubble, yelling out that the emperor has no clothes.
Unable to admit this, the emperor continues on his way. But the townsfolk now laugh.
This simple tale powerfully criticises rulers who tell untruths, performing intelligence and leadership, as well as those who uncritically allow this. ' back

Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia, Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In the field of digital signal processing, the sampling theorem is a fundamental bridge between continuous-time signals (often called "analog signals") and discrete-time signals (often called "digital signals"). It establishes a sufficient condition for a sample rate that permits a discrete sequence of samples to capture all the information from a continuous-time signal of finite bandwidth.' back

Omar Kayyam, The Rubaiyat of Omar Kayyan, ' This website is dedicated to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward FitzGerald. It is intended to be a repository for Rubaiyat editions, art, and other media related to this wonderful book of poetry.
Editions included on this website are ones that either I have personally collected or visitors have reached out with (noted when that is the case), complete with metadata such as publisher, year, artist, and other pertinent information that I have put together. If you have an edition you want to see added or is missing, please reach out so we can see about adding it! Or if you have one you want to sell, also reach out! The website is by no means comprehensive yet.
For editions that I've collected, I take pictures of all notable parts of the copy and write a short blurb/'review' of them. Sometimes I do research into something interesting about them. I am not a formally educated expert in book trade/history, so my understanding/terminology may not always be perfectly accurate. I do my best to share what I have learned. If you realize an error or something that could be improved.
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P. A. M. Dirac (1927b), The Quantum Theory of Dispersion, ' The new quantum mechanics could at first be used to answer questions concerning radiation only through analogies with the classical theory. In Heisenberg’s original matrix theory, for instance, it is assumed that the matrix elements of the polarisation of an atom determine the emission and absorption of radiation analogously to the Fourier components in the classical theory. In more recent theories* a certain expression for the electric density obtained from the quantum mechanics is used to determine the emitted radiation by the same formulae as in the classical theory. These methods give satisfactory results in many cases, but cannot even be applied to problems where the classical analogies are obscure or non-existent, such as resonance radiation and the breadths of spectral lines.' back

PAM Dirac (1927a), The Quantum Theory of the Emission and Absorption of Radiation, 'The new quantum theory, based on the assumption that the dynamical variables do not obey the commutative law of multiplication, has by now been developed sufficiently to form a fairly complete theory of dynamics. One can treat mathematically the problem of any dynamical system composed of a number of particles with instantaneous forces acting between them, provided it is describable by a Hamiltonian function, and one can interpret the mathematics physically by a quite definite general method.
On the other hand, hardly anything has been done up to the present on quantum electrodynamics. The questions of the correct treatment of a system in which the forces are propagated with the velocity of light instead of instantaneously, of the production of an electromagnetic field by a moving electron, and of the reaction of this field on the electron have not yet been touched. In addition, there is a serious difficulty in making the theory satisfy all the requirements of the restricted principle of relativity, since a Hamiltonian function can no longer be used.
This relativity question is, of course, connected with the previous ones, and it will be impossible to answer any one question completely without at the same time answering them all. However, it appears to be possible to build up a fairly satisfactory theory of the emission of radiation and of the reaction of the radiation field on the emitting system on the basis of a kinematics and dynamics which are not strictly relativistic. This is the main object of the present paper.' back

Paul Collins, Can Christianity and population control co-exist?, 'Despite the views of some church leaders - such as George Pell - who deny global warming, most Christians understand the need to care for the natural world and have embraced the scientific consensus on global warming.[ . . .]
But there is one thing that stymies Christians regarding the ecological crisis: they find it almost impossible to confront the issue of population.
They are not alone in this. Australia still doesn’t have a population policy; Sir David Attenborough says there “seems to be some bizarre taboo around the subject.”
Perhaps this is because we have never been in this situation before. All our previous ethical and theological norms don’t apply to the population catastrophe facing us. It involves radical rethinking of our oldest and most treasured moral presuppositions.
What needs to be rethought? First we have to jettison anthropocentrism, the focus on humankind and its needs to the exclusion of all other species and priorities.
Anthropocentrism rest on the assumption that we constitute the entire meaning of the cosmos. Priest and ecotheologian Thomas Berry says it is rooted in “our failure to think of ourselves as a species, interconnected with and biologically interdependent on the rest of reality.” We have become besotted with “the pathos of the human” and take ourselves and needs as the focus, norm, and arbiter of all that exists.
Anthropocentrism also leads straight to the absurd assumption that the entire world can be turned into a feed lot for humankind with loss of all wildernesses and the extinction of tens of thousands of species.' back

Paul of Tarsus, Galatians, 5:16-24, '16 But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. 18 But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under the law. 19 Now the works of the flesh are evident: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, 20 idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, 21 envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. 22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law. 24 And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.' back

Philip Kennicott (2026_03_31), The Met gave a dark opera a happy ending. What’s that say about America?, ' People who care about opera can’t stop talking about the baby, or “that damned baby” as a disgruntled patron put it on the way out of the Metropolitan Opera last week. It’s a directorial conceit in a lavish new production of Richard Wagner’s opera “Tristan und Isolde,” one of the most revolutionary and shattering works in the history of music. And culture.
There is no baby in Wagner’s original, a three-act, five-hour, orgiastic meditation on desire and death, which ends with both its title characters embracing mutual oblivion. But director Yuval Sharon has added one in the final minutes of the work, with Isolde apparently giving birth to a child who is passed around, coddled and fussed over by the few lucky characters who survive Wagner’s 1865 interlacing of Eros and Thanatos, or the death drive.[. . .]
It’s hard to overestimate the impact of Wagner’s “Tristan” on European culture when it premiered. Wagner broke off work on his gigantic, four-opera cycle, “The Ring of the Nibelung,” to compose “Tristan,” and with it, his music became more chromatic, restless, unstable, yearning, a seething stew of intertwined motifs that pile up tension without resolution. He also gave expression to ideas borrowed from the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose distinctly pessimistic world view had a profound effect on the composer.
Schopenhauer, borrowing from Eastern philosophy, had supposedly discovered the missing link in western metaphysical systems: the Will, a kind of endless striving, in all of nature and man as well, a perpetual urging forth beyond time, space and the world of appearances. It was also the source of all our unhappiness. Even happiness — a hollow idea — was merely the negation or renunciation of Will.
So, along with a lot of operatic folderol about love potions, honor, duty and revenge, Wagner’s lovers seek some kind of mystical love-death in which they leave behind the sham world of day and its petty concern with life, and embrace a rapturous annihilation.
In a program note, Sharon suggests that the baby may be Tristan himself, and thus “a symbol for our participation in nature’s endless cycle.” But that not only makes no sense, it’s a sop to the apparently bottomless need of American audiences to find something cheerfully redeeming in a work that is, in fact, dangerously toxic. In Schopenhauer, not even nature is immune to the relentlessness and misery of the perpetually striving will.' back

Physics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, Physics (Aristotle) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The Physics (Greek: Φυσικὴ ἀκρόασις Phusike akroasis; Latin: Physica, or Naturales Auscultationes, possibly meaning "lectures on nature") is a named text, written in ancient Greek, collated from a collection of surviving manuscripts known as the Corpus Aristotelicum, attributed to the 4th-century BC philosopher Aristotle.
It is a collection of treatises or lessons that deals with the most general (philosophical) principles of natural or moving things, both living and non-living, rather than physical theories (in the modern sense) or investigations of the particular contents of the universe. The chief purpose of the work is to discover the principles and causes of (and not merely to describe) change, or movement, or motion (κίνησις kinesis), especially that of natural wholes (mostly living things, but also inanimate wholes like the cosmos). In the conventional Andronicean ordering of Aristotle's works, it stands at the head of, as well as being foundational to, the long series of physical, cosmological and biological treatises, whose ancient Greek title, τὰ φυσικά, means "the [writings] on nature" or "natural philosophy".' back

Physics Today, About us, ' Physics Today, the flagship publication of the American Institute of Physics, is the most influential and closely followed physics magazine in the world.
Physics Today's mission is to be a unifying influence on the physical sciences by cultivating a shared understanding, appreciation, and sense of belonging among physical scientists. It does that by providing authoritative, engaging coverage of physical science research and its applications without regard to disciplinary boundaries; by reporting on the often complex interactions of the physical sciences with each other and with other spheres of human endeavor; and by offering a forum for the exchange of ideas within the scientific community. With authoritative features, full news coverage and analysis, and fresh perspectives on technological advances and ground-breaking research, Physics Today informs readers about science and its role in society.' back

Richard Behiel (2026_03_28), The Four Laws of Black Hole Mechanica, ' This is a full walkthrough of Bardeen, Carter, and Hawking's famous 1973 paper, the paper that established the mathematical analogy between black holes and thermodynamics, two years before Hawking radiation made that analogy real. The subject matter is quite intense, but also fascinating, and it's a great exercise in general relativity. The video is timestamped, so that it can be easily watched across multiple viewings. Given its length, it's something like a book in video form. Link to the 1973 paper: https://projecteuclid.org/journals/communications-in-mathematical-physics/volume-31/issue-2/The-four-laws-of-black-hole-mechanics/cmp/1103858973.pdf back

Robert Plant (2025_05_11), Saving Grace feat Suzi Dian, 0:00 The Very Day I’m Gone (Nora Brown) 5:08 The Cuckoo (Traditional) 10:41 Four Sticks (Led Zeppelin) 16:05 Down to the Sea (Robert Plant) 20:41 Soul of a Man (Traditional) 26:35 Orphan Girl (Gillian Welch) 30:54 The Rain Song (Led Zeppelin) 38:14 Let the Four Winds Blow (Robert Plant) 45:04 Everybody’s Song (Low) 49:44 As I Roved Out (Traditional) 1:00:41 For the Turnstiles (Neil Young) 1:06:42 Friends (Led Zeppelin) Encore: 1:14:50 Gallows Pole/Black Dog (Traditional/Led Zeppelin) 1:22:55 And We Bid You Goodnight (Traditional) back

Robert Plant (Saving Grace), NPR Tiny Desk, ' When Robert Plant first stepped behind the Tiny Desk on a blustery Halloween afternoon, he took stock of the relatively stripped-down setup. "This is just like Live Aid," he said with a smile. "I couldn't hear myself there either." He was referring to the fact we don't amplify voices or use monitors so artists can hear themselves.
But if ever there was someone up to the challenge, it's Robert Plant. With a voice that's only gotten better with age, Plant has deftly moved from the full-throated rock and swagger of Led Zeppelin to the more restrained and profoundly beautiful folk, blues and roots music found on more recent recordings. His latest solo album, Saving Grace, is a collection of covers that range from the traditional spiritual "Gospel Plough" to "It's A Beautiful Day Today" by Moby Grape, a psychedelic rock band that, Plant says, still makes him "weepy."
Plant and his band perform both songs for this set, along with a version of "Higher Rock" by the singer-songwriter Martha Scanlan and Low's "Everybody's Song." They close with a new arrangement of "Gallows Pole," another traditional Plant first reinterpreted for the Led Zeppelin III album in 1969.' back

Sam Francis (2026_04_01), Meet the biochemist-turned-campaigner keeping the Greens’ hot streak going, ' LONDON — “We are a big party now.” That’s the mantra Chris Williams is drumming into Green volunteers as they adjust to 200,000 members, by-election success, and a rise in the British polls.
The left-wing outfit is spooking MPs in Britain’s governing Labour Party after snatching victory in a high-stakes parliamentary race last month.
The Greens are eyeing major gains in upcoming local votes — and will be relying on a tried-and-tested playbook drawn up by Williams, a biochemist-turned-campaigns geek who has climbed the party’s ranks to be its deputy CEO. For Williams, the challenge isn't just winning votes — it's convincing his own party they’re finally ready to play in the big leagues.
The Greens’ current hot streak can be traced back to an overlooked win of a single council seat in an overcast Solihull back in 2008.
Williams, a local who had only recently graduated from Oxford, drove the party to win a working‑class neighborhood that had been a Labour stronghold.
It was a victory that barely made a ripple in the national press. But a Green Party that had by then spent 18 years clawing its way to triple‑digit figures for councilors was “gob-smacked” by the result, Williams says.
Seventeen years later, Williams is deputy CEO of the party, overseeing its election strategy at an inflection point for the Greens under new leader Zack Polanski.
Williams' work “was a massive, massive evolution of what we were doing into something much more effective,” says Sian Berry, the Green Party’s MP for Brighton Pavilion.
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Science in the medieval Islamic world - Wikipedia, Science in the medieval Islamic world - Wikipedia, the free enecyclopedia, Science in the medieval Islamic world was the science developed and practised during the Islamic Golden Age under the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, the Umayyads of Córdoba, the Abbadids of Seville, the Samanids, the Ziyarids and the Buyids in Persia and beyond, spanning the period roughly between 786 and 1258. Islamic scientific achievements encompassed a wide range of subject areas, especially astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Other subjects of scientific inquiry included alchemy and chemistry, botany and agronomy, geography and cartography, ophthalmology, pharmacology, physics, and zoology.
Medieval Islamic science had practical purposes as well as the goal of understanding. For example, astronomy was useful for determining the Qibla, the direction in which to pray, botany had practical application in agriculture, as in the works of Ibn Bassal and Ibn al-'Awwam, and geography enabled Abu Zayd al-Balkhi to make accurate maps. Islamic mathematicians such as Al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna and Jamshīd al-Kāshī made advances in algebra, trigonometry, geometry and Arabic numerals. Islamic doctors described diseases like smallpox and measles, and challenged classical Greek medical theory. Al-Biruni, Avicenna and others described the preparation of hundreds of drugs made from medicinal plants and chemical compounds. Islamic physicists such as Ibn Al-Haytham, Al-Bīrūnī and others studied optics and mechanics as well as astronomy, and criticised Aristotle's view of motion.
During the Middle Ages, Islamic science flourished across a wide area around the Mediterranean Sea and further afield, for several centuries, in a wide range of institutions.' back

Self-adjoint operator - Wikipedia, Self-adjoint operator - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' In mathematics, a self-adjoint operator on a complex vector space V with inner product ⟨ ⋅ , ⋅ ⟩ is a linear map A (from V to itself) that is its own adjoint. That is, ⟨ A x , y ⟩ = ⟨ x , A y ⟩ for all x , y ∈ V If V {\displaystyle V} is finite-dimensional with a given orthonormal basis, this is equivalent to the condition that the matrix of A is a Hermitian matrix, i.e., equal to its conjugate transpose A ∗ By the finite-dimensional spectral theorem, V has an orthonormal basis such that the matrix of A relative to this basis is a diagonal matrix with entries in the real numbers. This article deals with applying generalizations of this concept to operators on Hilbert spaces of arbitrary dimension.
Self-adjoint operators are used in functional analysis and quantum mechanics. In quantum mechanics their importance lies in the Dirac–von Neumann formulation of quantum mechanics, in which physical observables such as position, momentum, angular momentum and spin are represented by self-adjoint operators on a Hilbert space.' back

Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, Unmoved mover - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, ' The unmoved mover (Ancient Greek: ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, lit. 'that which moves without being moved' or prime mover (Latin: primum movens) is a concept advanced by Aristotle as a primary cause (or first uncaused cause) or "mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the unmoved mover moves other things, but is not itself moved by any prior action. In Book 12 (Greek: Λ) of his Metaphysics, Aristotle describes the unmoved mover as being perfectly beautiful, indivisible, and contemplating only the perfect contemplation: self-contemplation. He equates this concept also with the active intellect. This Aristotelian concept had its roots in cosmological speculations of the earliest Greek pre-Socratic philosophers and became highly influential and widely drawn upon in medieval philosophy and theology. St. Thomas Aquinas, for example, elaborated on the unmoved mover in the Quinque viae. ' back

Wei Wei (2026_03_27), What ancient Chinese wisdom can offer a divided world – and the US, ' It is no accident that Chinese leaders, from the head of state to the foreign minister, so often turn to classical poems, historical essays and age-old proverbs to explain the country’s stance and foreign policy. These are not decorative phrases. They are windows into a civilisation that measures time in millennia, not election cycles, and draws its lessons not from recent decades, but from thousands of years of rise and fall, unity and division, war and peace.
The most recent example came during China’s annual parliamentary “two sessions” meetings, when Foreign Minister Wang Yi quoted from On the Faults of the Qin Dynasty, written about 2,200 years ago. “When benevolence and justice are not practised, the position of strength shifts,” he said.
The essay dissects the collapse of the mighty Qin dynasty, which unified ancient China but collapsed rapidly precisely because it relied on brute force rather than benevolence and legitimacy. Wang was not giving a lecture. It was a historical warning: power without justice is self-defeating. Strength without restraint carries the seeds of its own destruction.' back

Whiteley (film) - Wikipedia, Whiteley (film) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, Whiteley is a 2017 Australian documentary directed by James Bogle and produced by Sue Clothier. It explores the life of painter Brett Whiteley, from his birth in Sydney to his death alone in a motel room. It uses collage, montage and re-enactments, using personal photo albums, archival material, press clippings, letters and footage from Don Featherstone's Difficult Pleasure documentary on Whiteley. back

Yonatan Touval (2026_03_29), Is It 1914 In America?, Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory. Four weeks into the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, one conclusion is already difficult to avoid. Our leaders preside over an extraordinary machinery of destruction, but they remain strikingly obtuse about human beings — about their pride, shame, convictions and historical memory.
The war’s architects appear to have assumed that killing a nation’s leaders, dominating airspace and destroying infrastructure would produce regime collapse in Tehran and strategic clarity in Washington and Jerusalem. Instead, Iran, though badly weakened, has managed to disrupt shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, drastically widen the war’s economic radius and force Washington into the old, unglamorous business of soliciting allied help after entering a war confident that it would be swift and decisive.
It is tempting to describe this as a failure of intelligence. Technically, it is not. The spycraft kind of intelligence behind the war planning and execution is extensive. Recent reporting suggests that Israeli intelligence spent years penetrating Tehran’s traffic cameras and communications networks and built what one unnamed Israeli source described to CNN as an A.I.-powered “target-production machine” capable of turning enormous volumes of visual, human and signals intelligence into precise strike coordinates. That is an extraordinary achievement of surveillance and targeting.
Yet never has so much been seen, so precisely, by so many people who understand so little of what they are seeing. A system can tell you where a man is. It cannot tell you what his death will mean for a nation. Such systems are trained on behavior, not on meaning — they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honors, remembers or would die for.
This is the recurring illusion of overequipped leaders: Because they can map the battle space, they think they understand the war. But war is never merely a technical contest. It is shaped by grievance, sacred narrative, the memory of past humiliations and the desire for revenge. Those are not atmospheric complications added to an otherwise technical enterprise. They are what the war ia about.
So the familiar errors appear. The war planners imagine that a regime can be decapitated into collapse, whereas external attack often does the opposite — binding a battered state more tightly to a society newly united by injury, humiliation and rage. They imagine that destroying conventional assets would settle the matter, as if legitimacy, wounded sovereignty and collective anger were secondary rather than the war’s actual terrain. Planners who took their adversary’s self-understanding seriously — rather than discounting it as propaganda — might have anticipated that an attack would not weaken the regime’s narrative but instead fulfill it. They might also have foreseen the paradox that systematic decapitation does not produce negotiators. It removes them.' back